Pirate Bay Defendants Found Guilty

This is a very old post that was automatically imported from LiveJournal. I have done my best to fix up the formatting, but some issues may remain. Comments have not been preserved.

So, today the defendants in the Pirate Bay trial were found guilty, sentenced to a year each in prison and fined $3.6M.

AND NOTHING WILL CHANGE.

Whether they appeal successfully or not, nothing changes. Whether the Pirate Bay goes down or not, nothing changes. If ISPs across the globe block all BitTorrent traffic completely, there’ll be a slight blip in file-sharing, temporarily. Because the Pirate Bay is one site of thousands, and because those who create new file-sharing technologies will always be several steps ahead of the courts.

Granted, a lot of this file-sharing is illegal. But I’m still oddly proud of how easily the internet has made it unkillable.